about a puddle.
Right away, Barry was like that, ‘Miss, Miss, I didn’t. They’re lying, I didn’t!’
It was fucking obvious who was telling the truth.
The teacher went like that, ‘Barry, why would they lie?’ Then she got out some paper from her desk and gave him lines.
A day or so passed, and we had spare time in the class. Barry was sitting on his desk, near me, reading a magazine. It was a music magazine, like Look In. And he asked me, ‘What music do you like?’
That was difficult for me. A difficult question to answer.
You see, I wasn’t really into music, in a way. It’s hard to explain why. I liked music in general, I’d watch Top of the Pops and I’d like all that, but I don’t think I liked any bands or songs in particular. I’d like novelty songs, like ‘Shaddap You Face’, or singers with a strange look, like Toyah or Adam Ant, but I was more into how they looked than the songs. I didn’t know what most songs meant. A lot of songs were about love, and I didn’t really know what that was. Everybody else seemed to know. It was a bit like that feeling I had with the Bollywig. I felt a bit left out, I felt a bit embarrassed about love.
So when Barry asked me what music I liked, I felt exposed. I felt that if I just picked a song, I’d be caught out. If I picked a song with the word ‘love’ in it, I’d be laughed at, or asked to explain what love is, and who I loved. I didn’t actually go through that thought process, but you know what I mean, it was more of a gut feeling.
So I just said, ‘I don’t really like music.’
He said, ‘You don’t like music? How can you not like music? That’s stupid.’
Then he went back to his magazine.
I felt my cheeks go red. I felt humiliated, even though nobody else heard. I can’t remember what I did next, but I can imagine I looked down at my jotter, I looked down at my drawing or whatever, and just sat there, with my pencil on the paper, not moving. My pencil making a hole in the paper.
I hated him. I hated him and his pale skin and freckly face and big stupid jaw. Who did he think he was? Who was he? Who was he to come to my school, my class, this stranger, coming to my school and splashing lassies with puddles, and sit next to me and make me feel stupid? I hated him for saying that.
A day or so later, it was raining again. And we all came back in from lunch.
When the teacher arrived, I put my hand up.
The teacher said, ‘What is it, Brian?’
I said, ‘Miss, Barry splashed me.’
And then Barry, right on cue, said, ‘Miss, Miss, he’s lying, he’s lying.’
The teacher just went straight for her drawer to pull out some lined A4, and said what I hoped she would say. ‘Barry … why would he lie?’
Stitched up like a kipper.
A risky move, considering he looked like he could batter me, but that’s how angry I was.
And not long after that, he was gone.
Lassies
As you’ve maybe been able to tell so far, I wasn’t very good with my feelings when I was wee. Well, that was especially true when it came to lassies.
I was down in Millport once, when I was nine, wandering about by myself, and I bumped into a lassie from my class, called Helen. We played about for a bit, even though I never really spoke to her in my class, and she never spoke to me.
Then, one night, when we were in the arcade, she asked me to get off with her. I don’t know if you yourself are familiar with the term ‘to get off with’, but it means to kiss. To snog.
Anyway, I shat it.
It wasn’t just because I was shy. There was more to it than that. When I was in primary school, I got mixed up about one or two things. I overheard things and saw things, and I think it fucked with my head.
First of all, I’d see older boys talking about shagging. I must have just been in primary two or three. There would be older boys either in my school or on the street that I stayed, talking about lassies, fannies, poking, shagging, licking out, sluts, cows, whores. I can imagine that most of the boys were virgins, really, but I think it made them feel more grown up if they talked about lassies like that.
Any time I heard about shagging or anything sexual, it was from a boy’s perspective, and the sexual thing was something that was done to the lassie. You didnae do it with the lassie, you did it to the lassie. And then you slagged her off for it.
These boys would do shagging motions, they’d have these scowling faces, they’d make it seem nasty and minging. One of them talked about some lassie’s fanny bleeding, either through shagging or poking. They’d say all this minging stuff, right in front of me. Nobody said, ‘Here, we better talk about this somewhere else, wee Brian’s here.’
All this stuff was going into my head, all this sexual stuff. It sounded abusive. It sounded aggressive. It sounded like you had to be a bad person to do it, you had to not care about the lassie, and then later you’d slag the lassie off, you’d laugh about her. And in some way, the lassies liked it.
It was a horrible way to be confused.
But what’s that got to do with Helen asking me to get off with her? Well, I’d somehow got it into my head that ‘to get off with’ meant to shag.
I didn’t even really know what shagging was. It was something to do with putting your willy in their fanny and moving about. And that’s what I thought she was wanting me to do, or something like that. It didn’t seem out of the ordinary, because I’d heard other boys and lassies my age talk about getting off with each other, so I thought they were all at it. And it fucking horrified me. It was fucking nightmarish.
So I said to her, ‘No.’
I remember that I was playing a game in the arcade at the time, and I was trying to ignore her. But she kept asking me. ‘Please, Brian. Pleeeease!’
I went from one game to another to get away from her, but she kept following me. I started playing another game, hoping she’d go away. I was petrified. Petrified with a beetroot face. I remember ‘Let’s Hear It for the Boy’ by Deniece Williams was playing, and it made me feel even more petrified. In the song, she was singing about some boy she liked, and here was this Helen following me about.
She put her hands on my waist, and I booted her.
I kicked behind me without looking back. I kicked her leg.
And she went away.
I was fucking shitting it to go back to school. I thought that when I went back she’d be harassing me there as well, or telling everybody that I didn’t get off with her, and they’d all laugh at me. Why would I not want to get off with a lassie? What was wrong with me? Did I not know how to do it?
But when I went back, fuck all happened. I
